Why It Matters Occupations
Summary
We have estimated the number of economically active individuals in a selected postcode, and broken that population down by their occupations.
Interpretation
| Dataset | Explanation |
|---|---|
| Total Number of Economically Active Residents with An Occupation | This tells you the total number of residents living in your postcode are aged 16 or over and that have a source of income. i.e. they are not unemployed or in fulltime education. |
| Percentage of Residents Working as Managers, directors and senior officials | This tells you the percentage of all the ecenomically active residents working as Managers, directors and senior officials. |
| Percentage of Residents in Professional Occupations | This tells you the percentage of all the ecenomically active residents working in Professional Occupations. |
| Percentage of Residents in Associate Professional and Technical Occupations | This tells you the percentage of all the ecenomically active residents working in Associate Professional and Technical Occupations. |
| Percentage of Residents in Administrative and Secretarial Occupations | This tells you the percentage of all the ecenomically active residents working in Administrative and Secretarial Occupations. |
| Percentage of Residents in Skilled Trades Occupations | This tells you the percentage of all the ecenomically active residents working in Skilled Trades Occupations. |
| Percentage of Residents in Caring, Leisure and Other Service Occupations | This tells you the percentage of all the ecenomically active residents working in Caring, Leisure and Other Service Occupations. |
| Percentage of Residents in Sales and Customer Service Occupations | This tells you the percentage of all the ecenomically active residents working in Sales and Customer Service Occupations. |
| Percentage of Residents Working as Process, Plant and Machine Operatives | This tells you the percentage of all the ecenomically active residents working as Process, Plant and Machine Operatives. |
| Percentage of Residents in Elementary Occupations | This tells you the percentage of all the ecenomically active residents working in Elementary Occupations. |
Why the metric matters from a commercial inhabitant’s perspective
Neighbourhood occupation data is important to commercial inhabitants for three reasons. It can help local commercial inhabitants track emerging businesses and occupations. By way of example, circa twenty years ago, there wasn’t a digital information industry. By 2012, it employed more Londoners than the entire agriculture, forestry, and fishing industries.
Occupation data combined with income data also allows commercial inhabitants to estimate the types of occupations that residents do in wealthy, middle- and lower-income neighbourhoods, which in turns allows businesses to gauge the employment market, so as to be able to situate operations near talent pools and offer fair-market salaries. Finally, the occupation can be used to research issues that may be interesting to businesses, such as concentrations of certain types of employment in different geographic areas.
Why the metric matters from a residential inhabitant’s perspective
Occupation estimations are useful for residential inhabitants primarily because they are proxy indicators of the sort of lifestyles your neighbours are likely to ascribe to. For example, if you live in an area where the vast majority of your neighbours are employed in professional occupations, chances are, local goods and services will be designed to serve them, as compared to other neighbourhoods. Conversely, if you live in an area where most of your neighbours work in elementary occupations, then the services in your area are likely to reflect the demands associated with people employed in those occupations.
Londoners will also find that the area in which they live in will be subtly shaped by the personality types that represent the most commonly held occupations in their neighbourhood. As people are influenced in their preferences and behavioural patterns by their neighbours, and occupation is the best indicator of character type, less obvious neighbourhood characteristics- such as the openness to new development or commercial activities, travel mode choices, and acceptable noise levels are all shaped by the personality types most occurring in a neighbourhood.
General Commentary
The occupations that people undertake have long been of interest due to the “neighbourhood effects” that concentrations of certain local social characteristics interaction have on a neighbourhood. Whether this is because of environmental selection, whereby people choose to live (to the extent that they can) among people they wish to associate with, or that people choose to behave like their neighbours, even without interacting with them on the basis of observed (or inferred) behavioural patterns, occupation characteristics shape the character of neighbourhoods.
From our past, either as merchants, traders, craftsmen and domestic workers, to our position as the manufacturing centre of the country, Londoners, were until the 1950s, employed in the receipt and adaptation of goods and the provision of general services, initially more to the upper classes and then to the general population. Progressively, with the expansion of the middle class, more people could afford to purchase the labour of others for a wider variety of tasks, but far fewer were rich enough to have live in servants. Of course, London was also the country’s centre of administration, law, finance and medicine. It was not until the decline of manufacturing in the 1950s and 60s and the relaxation of financial regulations and London’s increasing connectedness to the global economy, that we became more of a knowledge economy and jobs began to grow in ‘high value business services’: finance and insurance, real estate, professional and technical service activities, and information and communication sectors.
These activities tend to cluster in specific areas of London meaning that some pockets (particularly central) have relatively high levels of employment compared to the London average. The current increased demand for specialist skills is reflected in the fact that these jobs have higher annual pay than the London average.
The prospect of higher earnings combined with well-connected public transport means that employers can draw on a wide pool of potential employees. Current estimates indicate that less than half of London’s workforce work in the same area of London that they live in. The concentration of specialised activities, and people and workers this attracts, stimulates demand for further economic activities in other parts of London.
In addition, London’s ever-increasing population generates a demand for local services such as retail, education, healthcare and other customer services. These industries are likely to continue to grow in line with London’s future population. The fastest growing job sectors in London are continually forecasted to be business and administration services, retail, wholesale, accommodation and food services, and construction.
(Photograph: Eebrius, Wikimedia Commons)
Trivia
When Prince Louis’ birth certificate was released the general public was interested to know what his parents had listed as their occupations, as they have various public duties and titles, but they went for the most succinct and powerful option with ‘Prince of the United Kingdom’ and ‘Princess of the United Kingdom’.
History
Demographics - Occupations Records from the period following the Great Fire of London indicated that a large proportion of Londoners were merchants and traders who sold their wares in the City, East End and West End. In addition, weaving and dyeing, spinning and cloth finishing were common jobs. Another large employer of Londoners was the retail of foodstuffs. London’s stratified class system was very evident from the fact that the largest single occupational group was servants and after this, miscellaneous manual jobs such as of porters, street vendors and washerwomen.
The numbers of medical and legal professionals, grew rapidly from the last quarter of the seventeenth century to the mid-eighteenth century. Lots more hospitals and institutions were established in London in the eighteenth century and it became Britain’s largest manufacturing centre, its largest port, and the centre of governance, the professions, trade, and finance. Approximately one third of the population was involved in manufacturing. Retail occupations still made up a large proportion of those found in London - in this period one in nine Londoners kept a shop. Half of all employed women worked in domestic service in this period (compared to perhaps five percent of men). Beyond this, women were largely restricted to needlework and laundry, and the large numbers of unskilled and poorly paid employments associated with street selling and casual labour.
In the late-eighteenth century, London was more geographically integrated in terms of social standing and occupation but, by the early nineteenth century the city had become increasingly subdivided between rich and poor, and the divide between east and west was firmly entrenched and with that the sorts of occupations you found in each area.
The East End was home to manufacturers, brewers and distillers, as well as those who worked in sugar processing and textiles. In St Giles, in the fields and Farringdon, the majority made a living in the service industries of the capital - as porters and needle women, and street hawkers. The Square Mile was the home of financial services of insurance and merchant banking along with warehousing and trading. The West End was home to an increasingly wealthy elite – perhaps the richest in Europe at that time, and in response it became home to skilled craftsmen such as coach makers, and dancing masters.
In the early 1900s London had the biggest workforce and largest local market, commercial banks, and the advantage of London’s large and deep port, and rail network. About two fifths of the working population was employed in manufacturing of one kind or another at this time.
During the First World War some London businesses suffered, construction generally came to a halt and Britain’s export industry was weaker. However, manufacturing thrived, as London’s many factories were kept busy producing munitions, military equipment and other wartime requirements. Women moved into the jobs that men had left vacant, and wages rose as employers had to compete for a smaller pool of workers. During the Second World War, however, the decline of manufacturing in London began as businesses were forced to move away in order to avoid the German’s bombing of the dockside factories. The majority of these factories never returned to the area and with much of the infrastructure destroyed industry continued to migrate away from London in the 1950s. However, mechanisation and more efficient goods handling meant that once the port began to function again it surpassed pre-war tonnage and peaked in the 1960s. The process of de-colonisation led to a decline in trade through London. From the 1960s to 1980s all London’s docks closed with the exception of Tilbury. The vast area of docks lay empty and derelict with the loss of twenty-five thousand direct jobs.
The decline of the manufacturing industry in London coincided with the enlargement of the financial services sector. At the end of the 1950s, UK regulations around foreign exchange were relaxed so the Square Mile took on a new role in the global foreign exchange trade. In the 1950s, a negligible number of foreign banks had branches in London, but by the late 1990s the City could list almost six hundred. Yet probably the most significant event to boost London’s position in the world’s finances was the ‘Big Bang’ that took place in October 1986. Rules that separated different kinds of financial institutions were discontinued, allowing them the possibility to offer a full range of services to their clients. A year before Big Bang, the Bank of England had relaxed the rule that banking headquarters were obliged to be located within the City. During the same decade the government created a new enterprise zone in East London leading to the new financial district of Docklands.